A year in the life of our flourishing floodplains

Many of these ponds have been filled in to increase land use for agriculture. Others, like this one, have just been abandoned and become overgrown.

But not for much longer...

Along with many other ponds in the Vale, we're restoring it to its former glory.

At Boundary Court Farm we’re restoring two new ponds to provide essential fresh water for farmland wildlife like dragonflies and damselflies.

Farmland ponds are essential stepping stones in the landscape and often provide wildlife with the only water for several kilometres.  These ponds will also help store water during heavy rain and reduce the risk of flooding.

Here, we’re catching aquatic insects as well as their predators like spiders and beetles, to see if the label is showing up in their bodies.

We’re using this pond labelling technique to understand how farmland ponds boost biodiversity further afield by providing food for animals like farmland birds, bats, and amphibians.

We're working to bring water back into the landscape, creating new scrapes where waders like the curlew, and other wetland birds can live, feed and thrive.

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Here we're removing old drainage to enable the ground to hold onto water for longer and function more naturally.

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Just a few months later, it's great to see all our hard work paying off.

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This new wetland will now provide valuable feeding habitat for ducks, geese and swans in the winter and attract breeding waders like lapwings in the spring.

They’re an important food for many wetland animals like otters, bitterns and herons. But these days fewer and fewer eels are to be found, and this has widespread implications for the health of many wetland species.

To find out more about the eels’ decline we’re using eDNA sampled from wetlands across the vale, to find out which ones have eels in them. All creatures leave behind traces of DNA as they move about their environment, through shed skin cells, urine, scales, and mucus.

We’ve surveyed more than 100 ponds and wetlands across the Vale and found 37% have eels present, as highlighted by the green circles on this map of the area.

At the same time, we’re also conducting surveys and testing water for nutrients like nitrates, phosphates and ammonia, to see if there are water features eels prefer.

To further aid our research we’re braving the waters to collect sediment cores from the Vale's farm wetlands. The sediment is then analysed in our laboratory and allows us to reconstruct the wetland's history. The cores will also shed some light on how water quality, biodiversity and land use have changed in the area.

We’ll also be working out how much carbon is stored in the sediment and how levels have changed over time.